Google Developer Day 2011
Berlin
19.11.2011
Martin Vasko, 19.11.2011
@expressflow
Google Profile
We were very proud having a developer sandbox at this year's Google Developer Day in Berlin. This enabled us to connect with many different developers of Europe and all over the world. Special thanks to the GTUG Berlin for organizing this developer sandbox and providing a platform for fruitful discussions - our framework rised great interest and we think we provided funny and exciting show cases demonstrating the power of cloud enabled social bpm (bpm means - as we were asked many times - business process management ;-)
Thanks to all developers for your interest in our framework! Your positive feedback encouraged us to improve expressFlow to make it even more awesome ;-)
On this summary of the past Google Developer Day I want to sketch my impressions from this years Google Developer Day in Berlin.
Keynote
Everything started at around 09:00 at the Keynote. James Whittaker sketched a nice historical overview of the web – from it’s beginning back in 1990 to what it is today: A hybrid mixture of Apps on Cloud computing platforms. And he pointed out, that Google focuses especially on us – developers, who adopt this technology to make the web even cooler...
... and the audience was listening - 2500 developers from all over Europe listened to the words of James Whittaker explaining Google's idea of Cloud computing. Some folks were more others were less interested...
Ian Fette gave a short overview on the Google App Engine and presented a very interesting chart on the numbers of Google App Engine: 100k developers, 200k apps, 2 Billion page views per day are simply amazing numbers.
I need to repeat this number: 2 Billion page views per day - mindblowing!
After the Keynote I rushed back to my developer sandbox having great discussions about workflow technology in general and Google App Engine workflow technology in particular. I want to say a big thank you again to all the developers for their interest for our framework!
11:45 - 12:30: Google App Engine Overview & Update, Wesley Chun
Jerome Mouton gave a quick overview of how Google App Engine perfectly fit to his startup SnapEngage – developers can focus on their app logic and do not need to fight with racks, load balancing and infrastructural issues.
Wesley Chun gave an overview of Cloud computing in general and Cloud computing (in terms of PaaS) with Google App Engine in particular. He pointed out, that App Engine puts the developer into focus. With App Engine developers do not need to accomplish sys admin tasks. After sketching an overview of what Google App Engine is, he introduced the services provided by App Engine (Memcache, Datastore, URLFetch, …). These were the good news. The bad news: Google App Engine restricts access to several APIs: You cannot access files, open sockets or spawn new threads - well, this was not new to us. These restrictions come from the principle, that each application sits on a shared hardware and cannot trust it’s neighbor – Wesley exemplified this with the following question to the audience: Do you trust your neighbor?
After sketching the principles of Google App Engine, Wesley presented the numbers of Google App Engine – these were the same numbers as in the keynote previously. In my personal opinion you can scale these numbers up, as Google publishes these numbers. So internally they are even higher, for sure ;-)
At the end of his talk, he gave examples of websites hosted on Google App Engine (like the Video Stream of the royal wedding serving 42 000 browsers to stream). There were also very impressive numbers illustrating the performance of Google App Engine.
13:30 - 14:15: Building integrated Applications on Google's Cloud technologies, Michael Manoochehri
The slide-deck can be reached at the dedicated GDD 2011 Google App Engine instance. After introducing himself Michael sketched a very informative overview on Google’s new Cloud computing technologies. First he focused on the Google Cloud storage service enabling developers to store data on the Google cloud with massive filesizes. Google’s cloud storage service is built for scalability, performance and consistency. After presenting nice little tool demos, Michael outlined the planned usage of Google’s Cloud Storage service in combination with Google App Engine. The next API of interest was the Prediction API – an API I didn’t know before. The API provides machine learning and pattern-matching capabilities. Michael examined the prediction API by nice little examples in different languages unveiling the power of this API. Personally, I found the BigQuery examples the most mind-blowing little pieces of code. Michael presented this new feature as Google’s technology to address large data adhoc analysis. And the performed examples unveiled the full potential of this feature: He performed queries like: Who talked the most words in Othello? And BigQuery answered promptly: Less than 4 seconds for the result is quite impressive. I will definitely have a look at the BigQuery technology and see, how expressFlow can use this technology in analyzing business process data.
The rest of the Google Developer Day I spent on the sandbox having many fruitful discussions about expressFlow, workflow technology in general and Google App Engine workflows in particular. I enjoyed the Google Developer Day 2011 in Berlin pretty much and I am seeing forward to next years event: No developer, working with Google technology should miss this event! I will definitely come again!
And to give you some impressions of the whole organisation of the event, I provide some impressions of the organisation of the whole event (which was absolutely perfect ;-)
The entry with an island of fruits in the centre. Great!
Conclusion
The Google Developer Day 2011 was a great event to connect with other developers and exchange your experience from the daily use of Google technology - APIs, Dashboards, toolkits and the kind.
The sessions were organized pretty well and the presented showcases were easy to understand. Although no workshop did a deep dive on the APIs it was easy to follow and the structure was clear. But a deep dive was not the aim of this event. The main focus was to get an overview of what is now possible with the current status of the APIs and what is the future direction - and this aim was absolutely perfect communicated. Social events, networking, exchange of ideas and inspiration of other developers were a great benefit that I got in numerous discussions. I had a great weekend, listened to many interesting talks and connected to many great people - mission accomplished.